The Dam That Never Was

Now here's the one that hangs over this whole valley, and once you know it you'll see it everywhere. You are driving through a place the United States government condemned, cleared, and prepared to put underwater — and then, at the last, did not. Let me tell you about the Tocks Island Dam.

Go back to nineteen fifty-five. Two hurricanes hit back to back and the Delaware flooded catastrophically — dozens dead. So the government resolved to tame the river, and in nineteen sixty-two Congress authorized an enormous dam, to be built just upriver from the Gap at a spot called Tocks Island. It would have thrown a wall clear across the Delaware and backed the river up into a reservoir some thirty-seven miles long — a great lake filling this whole valley, for flood control, water, and power.

And to make that lake, they needed the land. So the government took it — by eminent domain, whether folks wanted to sell or not. They condemned something like seventy-two thousand acres up and down this valley, and they forced people out: on the order of four thousand families, thousands upon thousands of people, off farms and out of houses that in many cases their families had held since before the Revolution. Whole communities were emptied. The little township of Walpack, over on the Jersey side, went from a few hundred people to a few dozen — a ghost town, essentially, and it still is today. Folks were handed a check, often for less than the place was worth, and told to go. And they went, and they watched the government bulldoze the homes behind them.

And here is the gut-punch: the dam was never built. As the years dragged on, the engineers found the ground at the dam site was bad — loose glacial gravel that might not hold. The costs ballooned. The new environmental movement fought it hard. And in nineteen seventy-five the river-basin commission finally voted the whole thing down. The lake never rose. The families were gone for nothing — driven off their land to make way for a reservoir that exists only on old maps.

But here's the strange grace in it. The government already owned all that emptied land along the river. And rather than sell it off, they turned it into this — the national recreation area you're driving through, protected forever, wild and open and free. So the valley the people lost became a valley everyone can keep. It's a hard, hard trade, and I don't want to tie a bow on somebody else's heartbreak. But every mile of wild river and quiet forest out here is standing on the foundations of homes that were taken for a lake that never came. Drive it gently. It cost people everything.